In today's educational climate, an increasing number of persons seek knowledge and further education regarding a truly diverse and wide variety of subjects. As can be appreciated, education and training takes a wide variety of forms. Education starts at a very young age and extends through high school. Thereafter, persons may attend any of a variety of universities, colleges or technical centers. However, education and training is not limited to these formal environments. Illustratively, many companies, agencies and other entities implement training programs to train people with the skills those people need for their respective jobs. Additionally, after receiving a college education, many persons, in an increasingly greater rate, attend some type of graduate school. Graduate schools may include medical school, law school and business school, as well as a wide variety of other advanced curriculums. Even after such higher educations, for example, persons still attend conferences, seminars and other organized meetings to exchange information and ideas.
Accordingly, education and training are present in our lives from a very young age and might never end for some persons. As described above, this education takes a wide variety of forms. However, one common thread running through this education is the necessity to convey information from persons and materials that possess the knowledge, to persons wanting the knowledge. The persons providing the knowledge will hereinafter be referred to as “teachers,” with those persons receiving the knowledge referred to as “students.”
The training environment of a medical student provides insight into the presently used teaching methods. Typically, a medical student starts his or her education with the hope of being enriched by the knowledge he or she seeks. Typically, a medical student may walk into a classroom and, from day one, the lights go out and the slides start flashing on the screen. The rate at which the slides are shown may average as much as 180 slides per hour. Nevertheless, the slides pass by in front of the medical student and she is expected to digest this information.
The information used in teaching may come from numerous sources. For example, the slides shown to the medical students may be the result of years of collecting by the professor. Further, the slides may be one of a kind that the professor obtained from the professor's mentor, who used to be chairman of their department before he retired.
The students correctly perceive those slides as being of tremendous value. However, the students see the slides one time, and only one time, and then the slides are gone forever. After class, then, the students attempt to conjure up the slides either working alone or in groups. The students often unsuccessfully attempt to draw the slides when they are displayed in class. But before the essence of the slide is really captured, the next slide is being displayed. Then, after class the students might approach the professor and humbly request a copy of the slides. However, the slides often represent the career of the professor. As a result, the professor is hesitant to assist in a reproduction of his documents in any form.
The above scenario illustrates one of a variety of situations that prevent the exchange of information and knowledge from a teacher to a student. Accordingly, the scenario results in the students recreating the knowledge to which they were exposed. This re-creation might be in the form of notes or crude reproductions of the slides, or whatever other information was presented in class that day. Accordingly, there is a need to provide a method to exchange knowledge from a teacher to a student that is both beneficial and acceptable to all parties.
Alternatively, a situation may be present when the teacher does indeed prepare and provide materials to the students. However, even in this situation there are common problems. For example, a teacher may copy a favorite diagram from a resource book and paste that diagram into their own created materials. The teacher may then surround this copied diagram with the teacher's own text. This, for one, results in potential copyright infringement violations. Also, with the advent of desktop publishing capabilities, the accumulation of these materials is becoming progressively easier. The student accurately perceives this material as coming straight from the professor and, as a result, considers the material of great value. In addition, the university, for example, may require the student to purchase the professor's material. Alternatively, the university will recommend that the student buy a series of materials from a particular publisher.
Accordingly, a situation has developed in the academic world, and in other learning environments, in which administrative persons, faculty members and students are discouraged and concerned with regard to the decreasing quality of their study materials. People are discouraged both from the perspective of a teacher, providing the materials, and from the perspective of a student, receiving the materials. For students, the situation is particularly discouraging in that their command of the material, in testing situations as well as other situations, will dictate the success of their careers.
To address the aforementioned issues, systems have been developed to effectively collect information from a wide variety of sources and provide one or more items of material from this collection to students in an efficient manner. In accordance with one such system, an entire educational curriculum for an organization can be made available to a user in a readily accessible collection. That is, a collection can be characterized as global to a particular organization, such as a college or corporation, including all curriculum materials that the particular organization utilizes. The system can then provide for navigation of information in the collection to thereby permit a user to interact with one or more items of material in the collection as if those item(s) were single textbook(s), journal(s), video(s) or treatise(s), for example.
In such systems, curriculum material, including text and graphics, can be obtained from various sources, such as various professors and/or publishers, and thereafter digitized. In this regard, the text can be re-keyed or programmatically converted, while the graphics are scanned. Then, both the text and the graphics can be recombined utilizing a “mark-up” language, such as the Extensible Markup Language (XML). In such instances, the curriculum materials are structured in a hierarchical manner. That is, a book includes chapters, the chapters include sections, the sections include subsections, and so forth. Within one or more chapters, sections, subsections or the like, then, the curriculum may include graphics, such as diagrams and/or flowcharts.
As will be appreciated, such digitized curriculum materials can have very large files requiring a large amount of memory to store and render for display to a user. For example, the book PRINCIPLES OF INTERNAL MEDICINE can require 40 MB to fully digitize and mark up in accordance with XML. In such instances, it can require a computer system, such as that operated by a user, an undesirable amount of time to render the digitized curriculum materials for display to the user, and in some cases, overload the computer system to the point where the computer system fails to properly display the materials.
Thus, it may be desirable to configure the materials such that only a portion of the materials are rendered for display at any given time. Even structuring the materials in this manner, however, may require a computer system an undesirable amount of time to render the materials for display. In this regard, to render only a portion of curriculum materials structured in a hierarchical manner conventionally requires the computer system to access the materials from memory in a hierarchical manner from top down, and traverse the accessed materials until the particular portion of the curriculum materials is located. Such a process is typically inefficient, however, as it requires the computer system to access portions of the curriculum materials (i.e., those portions traversed before locating the desired portion) not subsequently utilized by the computer system in rendering the desired portion for display.